caught by the blade and dragged at by a woman's naked hand; the
youngest and fairest of the women, her child just torn away from a death
grasp and clasped to her breast with the grip of a steel vice, falls
backwards helplessly over the heap, right on the sword points; all knit
together and hurled down in one hopeless, frenzied, furious abandonment
of body and soul in the effort to save. Their shrieks ring in our ears
till the marble seems rending around us, but far back, at the bottom of
the stairs, there is something in the shadow like a heap of clothes. It
is a woman, sitting quiet,--quite quiet--still as any stone, she looks
down steadfastly on her dead child, laid along on the floor before her,
and her hand is pressed softly upon her brow.

Sec. 22. Various works in the Scuola di San Rocco.

Sec. 23. The Last Judgment. How treated by various painters.

This, to my mind, is the only imaginative; that is, the only true, real,
heartfelt representation of the being and actuality of the subject in
existence.[63] I should exhaust the patience of the reader if I were to
dwell at length on the various stupendous developments of the
imagination of Tintoret in the Scuola di San Rocco alone. I would fain
join a while in that solemn pause of the journey into Egypt, where the
silver boughs of the shadowy trees lace with their tremulous lines the
alternate folds of fair clouds, flushed by faint crimson light, and lie
across the streams of blue between those rosy islands, like the white
wakes of wandering ships; or watch beside the sleep of the disciples
among those massy leaves that lie so heavily on the dead of the night
beneath the descent of the angel of the agony, and toss fearfully above
the motion of the torches as the troop of the betrayer emerges out of
the hollows of the olives; or wait through the hour of accusing beside
the judgment seat of Pilate, where all is unseen, unfelt, except the one
figure that stands with its head bowed down, pale like a pillar of
moonlight, half bathed in the glory of the Godhead, half wrapt in the
whiteness of the shroud. Of these and all the other thoughts of
indescribable power that are now fading from the walls of those
neglected chambers, I may perhaps endeavor at some future time to
preserve some image and shadow more faithfully than by words; but I
shall at present terminate our series of illustrations by reference to a
work of less touching, but more tremendous appeal, the Last J